


As you value your life or your reason keep away from the moor...unless you have a shotgun and some rock salt.

by nomoreuturns



Category: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle, Supernatural, Thursday Next - Jasper Fforde
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-15
Updated: 2012-01-15
Packaged: 2017-10-29 15:06:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/321191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nomoreuturns/pseuds/nomoreuturns
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam and Dean stumble into <i>The Hound of the Baskervilles</i>. There they meet Sir Henry Baskerville, Sherlock Homes, Doctor John Watson...and Thursday Next and Hamlet?</p>
            </blockquote>





	As you value your life or your reason keep away from the moor...unless you have a shotgun and some rock salt.

"Dude, what the hell?"

Sam looked up from his copy of _The Hound of the Baskervilles_ in time to see the dimly-lit hotel room completely fade from view and be replaced by a foggy moor, just as the bed disappeared from under him. He landed flat on his back on the ground and lay there for a moment, stunned and staring up at the stars that had previously been obscured by...well, a _ceiling_. He scrambled to his feet and looked around; Dean was standing a few feet up the path, clinging to the shotgun he'd been cleaning.

"What the _hell_? Dean, what did you do?"

" _Me_? What did _you_ do? You're the one with the freaky mind powers!"

"You're the one who keeps gettting transported to weird places!"

Dean huffed.

"Just that room! And, OK, the past that one time..."

"Two times," Sam reminded him.

"You were there for one of them, so it doesn't count!" Dean insisted.

"And the future," Sam continued mercilessly. "And the djinni world..."

"That was in my _head_!" Dean snapped. "That _so_ doesn't count."

Before Sam could reply, a blood-curdling howl echoed across the moor. The brothers looked at one another and then moved so they were back-to-back, facing up and down the path; Sam tucked the book in his pocket and pulled out his Glock and knife while Dean pulled salt shells out of his pocket and loaded them into the shotgun.

"See anything?" Dean asked.

"Nope. You?"

"Nuh-uh. Wait...d'you hear that?"

Sam listened intently, and then he heard it; footfalls, headed towards them. It didn't sound like any sort of hellbeast, though...the sound was too light, too frantic.

"Man, this fog sucks," Dean complained. "I can't see a thing, it's messing with my hearing...whoa, shit!"

Sam felt Dean's aborted geture and glanced back over his shoulder; a young man was sprinting towards them, looking terrified. He paused, surprise overcoming fear for a split-second, and then dove towards them, yelling at the top of his lungs: "Save me, save me, kill it, kill it!"

Sam spun around so he was shoulder-to-shoulder with Dean, the other man safely behind them, as a massive black dog with glowing eyes and jaws leapt out of the darkness. Both he and Dean fired; the beast jerked as the rounds hit it and crashed to the ground. It twitched a few times, then lay motionless.

"Is it dead?" the man asked after a moment.

"Dead, or close to it," Dean replied. He walked over to the dog and nudged it with his boot. He glanced at Sam. "What do you think...black dog?"

"Maybe." Sam crouched down beside the dog. He frowned. This was all vaguely familiar...a sneaking suspicion occurred to him, and he reached out and ran a finger around the dog's eyes. "Huh."

"Dude!" Dean hissed. "What are you doing?"

"It's phosphorus," Sam said, stunned.

"What?"

"Phosphorus," a voice answered from out of the gloom. "An element that glows in the dark, used in this case to make an ordinary - if over-sized - dog appear as if it was a creature from hell."

Dean and Sam immediately aimed their guns at the speaker and his two out-of-breath companions, but the man they'd rescued stepped forward.

"It's all right," he told them. "These are my friends. May I introduce Doctor John Watson," he indicated the thin man in a bowler hat carrying a revolver with a cane tucked under his arm, "and Mr Sherlock Holmes," he gestured to the second man, who was watching them intently, his dark eyes flickering constantly from their weapons to their clothes to their faces. "And this is Inspector Lestrade from Scotland Yard," he concluded; the last man nodded to them tersely.

There was a few seconds of silence, and then...

"No. Fucking. Way." Dean said flatly.

"Dean..." Sam began.

"No, Sam, this is nuts. Sherlock Holmes? That shit's not real...it's a book!"

"Yeah," Sam agreed, pulling out the book he had stuffed in his pocket minutes earlier and tossing it to Dean. "A book I was reading just before we arrived here." Dean stared at the cover for a moment, then began to laugh.

"It was you!" he crowed, pointing. "You, and your freaky powers..."

"Freaky power is right," another voice, female this time, said. "What the hell are you two doing here?"

Everyone turned to stare at the two new people who had materialised, apparently out of nowhere. One was a young man who Sam thought reminded him a little bit of a Shakespearean character, and the other was the woman who had spoken.

"What do you mean, what are we doing here?" Dean asked. "We just...appeared. Here. And we saved this guy's life." The newcomers both frowned.

"What do you mean, you saved 'this guy's life'?" the woman asked slowly.

"Well, he was being chased by this - " Dean nudged the dog again, " - so we saved him."

" _You_ saved him?" she repeated, looking like this was the worst possible thing in the world.

"Yeah!"

The woman and the Shakespearean character turned to one another.

"This is bad," the Shakespearean character said in what he probably thought was _sotto voce_ but really wasn't. The woman shrugged.

"We've dealt with worse...probably." She sighed, then glanced at Sam and Dean and...well, the characters of _The Hound of the Baskervilles_. "OK. We're going to ascertain the damage, get these guys out of here, and hope that the narrative manages to circumvent this part of the text. Watson never interacted with these guys, so it should be all right...no-one should notice, anyway. Now," she added, turning to Sam and Dean with a grim expression on her face, "what did you do to the dog?"

Sam glanced at Dean. Dean glanced at Sam.

"Uh..."

"Well..."

The woman's expression got grimmer.

"What. Did you do. To the dog?"

"We thought it was a black dog, so we shot it," Dean said defiantly.

The woman stared at them.

"You shot it. You...shot it?" she repeated, bemused. Sam and Dean nodded. Beside her, the man laughed bitterly.

"This is brilliant! Just as we find our way into Sherlock Holmes, two idiot Outlanders show up and blast the bloody dog with a shotgun! Of course it would happen this way. Of bloody course..." He began pacing and gesturing to himself, muttering furiously.

"Uh...is he OK?" Sam asked. The woman rolled her eyes.

"He's Hamlet...he's a little dramatic."

"Not to interrupt," Watson - _Watson!_ Sam thought gleefully - interjected, looking around, "but what is that noise?" Everyone stopped, listening intently. At first Sam couldn't hear what the doctor had heard, but then he heard it: the repetitive _whoosh_ of displaced air, like a set of large wings, coming steadily towards them. Hamlet - _Hamlet!_ Sam thought again - and the woman both went pale.

"Get down!" the woman yelled; everyone dove to the ground as the _whoosh_ passed right over the top of them.

After a moment the _whoosh_ stopped; there was a dull thud, and then a doleful "Well, there it is, I suppose," rang out across the moor; the pronouncement was followed by a slurping sound.

Sam raised his head slowly. At first he couldn't see anything through the fog; after a second, however, he could make out...something. A creature, covered in raggedy grey fur, with bat-like wings and a foxish face and what looked like a beak or proboscis of some kind sunk deep into the ground. The area of moor around its beak was slowly becoming grey and lifeless. Sam glanced away; the woman caught his eye.

"What is that thing?" Sam whispered to her.

"It's a grammasite," she murmured. "They feeds on words, destroy books...there hasn't been one in Sherlock Holmes before; it must have followed us in. This one is an adjectivore...it's..."

A shotgun blast rang out through the cold night air; the grammasite exploded into wisps and words. Slowly, the words began to be absorbed back into their surroundings, which took on their original dark hues.

"Dead," Dean finished for her, lowering the shotgun. The woman stared at the dead grammasite for a moment, at the rapidly regenerating area, then turned to Dean

"What was in that thing?" she demanded. Dean shrugged, hefting the shotgun.

"Rock salt."

"Huh." The woman looked at the remains of grammasite, then back at Sam and Dean. She stuck out her hand.

"Nice to meet you. The name's Thursday...Thursday Next. How would you like to become a part of Jurisfiction?"

**Author's Note:**

> A very small fic written almost exactly a year ago for a cross-over challenge for the Y SO SRS? game by the illustrious rhombal of LJ. Occurs anytime after season five in Supernatural, and sometime in the future for Thursday Next & co.


End file.
